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by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow
2019: Chicago Review Press
336 Pages, 6X9 pages.
This long-awaited biography of the legendary Mississippi bluesman is the product of decades of research. Gayle Dean Wardlow has been interviewing people who knew Robert Johnson since the early 1960s. He was the person who discovered Johnson's death certificate in 1967. Bruce Conforth began his study of Johnson's life and music in 1970 and made it his personal mission to try to fill in the gaps in what was still unknown about him. While reading a pdf review proof of this book I perused the sources at the end and there are countless interviews with those who knew Johnson by the authors and other sources as well as the interviews Worth Long and other folklorists conducted of Robert Lockwood, Jr., Johnny Shines, David 'Honeyboy' Edwards, and Henry Townsend at the 1991 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. To my knowledge, they are among the first to make use of this material. It indicates that the research for this book is quite substantial.
Robert Johnson is one of the seminal persons in the pre-World War II blues. "Robert Johnson was using his guitar abilities to forge the transition from the older blues of Charley Patton, Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, Lead Belly, or even Son House, to the more modern approach and sounds of Muddy Waters and the postwar blues players. He played blues, pop tunes, jazz, and ragtime; started to popularize the use of guitar riffs as signature elements of a song; and was one of the first to use a boogie beat for his rhythm accompaniment, copying the driving, rhythmic bass that barrelhouse pianists played with their left hand. His playing helped move blues guitar fretting out of the first position and into the use of the entirety of the fretboard, opening musical possibilities that had previously been reserved for jazz guitarists."
To paraphrase the Chicago Review website, for this definitive biography the two authors relied on every possible interview, resource and document, most of it material that no one has ever seen before. As they state: "No book before this one has included all of the reminiscences of Johnson by the people who knew him personally. After more than fifty years of researching Robert’s life and performing his music, we decided to correct that omission and bring together those resources in our comprehensive biography. We meticulously researched every article, book, video, or film by any author or producer, from academic scholar to lay blues fan; we transcribed every quote by anyone who ever knew Robert; and we grounded this all with quotations from our own research and every other resource we could find. Every census record, city directory, marriage license, funeral notice, and newspaper article was studied and referenced."
The book opens with a chapter on how the legend surrounding Johnson, one of the Delta blues seminal artists developed, including a very cursory overview of the literature and early research on him. When Gayle Dean Wardlow located the Robert Johnson death certificate, it provided leads that allowed the tracing of his ancestors and those who knew him and the reconstruction of his life was made possible. But also parallel research from Mack McCormick and Steven LaVere also located Johnson family members and significant individuals such as Ike Zimmerman who played a significant role in Johnson's musical development. The role of reissues of Johnson's recordings in telling Johnson's story also is noted along with the liner notes and booklets accompanying the reissues, and books, articles and documentary videos.
Then they introduce us to Robert and his music. "The summer of 1936 Robert Johnson stood in front of Walker’s General Store and Gas Station adjoining the Martinsville train depot. He put down his bag made of blue-and-white bed ticking packed full of clothes, at least one notebook, and other belongings, and began playing his guitar. He was there to advertise his nighttime performance at O’Malley’s—a bootleg house not far from the old Damascus Church just north of neighboring Hazlehurst’s City limits, up the railroad tracks on the east side of old Highway 51. Hazlehurst was a town of about three thousand souls sitting thirty-five miles south of Jackson, Mississippi. Robert had been born in Hazlehurst twenty-five years earlier, and now he was there to play his blues at one of the many juke joints he frequented throughout the area. A slight five foot eight, 140 pounds, Robert was well known for more than just his music."
Then they provide the details of his life, first tracing his ancestors and the aspects of their lives. They also located the house Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, his birth and family hardships that led his mother to move with Charles Dodd, known as Spencer in Memphis. Charles Dodd fled to Memphis to avoid being lynched and provided Robert with as stable a home life as any he had in his young years. Later, Julia Majors with her existing children move in with Noah Johnson, Robert's actual father. They provide details of Robert's life in Memphis, including attending school and some of the experiences he could have expected growing up not far from Beale Street. He would likely have seen such Beale Street performers such as Frank Stokes, Will Shade, Furry Lewis, and others, perhaps attending and becoming part of the 'Spencer' family.
In the interval, his mother remarried to a sharecropper and came to Memphis to take Robert back to the Delta and uprooted him and moved him in with and moved him in with Will “Dusty” Willis, a sharecropper his mother had married in 1916. As the authors state "An intelligent, citified nine-year-old had been uprooted and placed in an alien environment: the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta." Furthermore, while exposed to the haunting blues of the Delta region, Robert hated farming, and his reluctance to go into the fields led to caning by his step-father and other punishments. There is much more here about his life and how he would leave for periods to visit the Spencers who he considered his only real family. He was finally told that his real father was a Noah Johnson and after finding out started calling himself Robert Johnson. Also by the time he was 15 Robert had started playing music. He was pretty good on the harmonica and jew's harp. He could also play some guitar and piano which he learned from his stepbrother in Memphis.
The authors detail experiments with a home-made guitar and the conflicts with his step-father and then how he met Willie Brown who further helped him with his guitar skills so he started playing parties and busking, at times traveling with Willie Moore. Moore was a musician turned “juke house gambler” that had toured with Handy’s Orchestra from Memphis. He teamed with Robert in the late 1920s playing a “complimenting guitar.” Moore recalled some of the songs Johnson played including “Captain George,” “Make Me a Pallet,” and “President McKinley"(using on slide on this), “You Can Mistreat Me Here but You Can’t When I Go Home” (perhaps an early version that later became “Dust My Broom”), “East St. Louis Blues,” and a bottleneck version of “Casey Jones.”
The authors detail teenage Robert's marriage to a 14-year old Virginia Travis, and her death during a difficult childbirth while he was away juking and playing music. The combined circumstances of her death and her family blaming him for her death because he played the devil's music. The authors state "Robert’s friends said he began to believe that he was to blame for her death, and he turned his back on the church and God. He began to blaspheme so badly when he was drinking… ."
He also was becoming skilled enough as a professional musician in the Delta region. But he still was playing in an older folk style whereas the rough, in-your-face, original bottleneck dance tunes that folks like Charlie Patton and Son House played was what folks increasingly wanted and when House and Willie Brown was in Robinsonville, Robert went to see them. House, years later would recall claiming Robert was a little boy who couldn't play guitar except making noise. And while House did give some tips, he was a 19-year old player who had been in jukes for two years.
After this incident, Johnson took up with Ike Zimmerman, who worked on a road crew as well as played the jukes. Zimmerman was quite an accomplished player and a showman. "Zimmerman alternated between fingerpicking and playing bottleneck slide—his slide was home-made from a bone. He was also a skilled harp player like the young Robert Johnson. And Ike understood how to work an audience." Robert even lived with Zimmerman for a period in addition to being mentored by him. At a certain point Robert had progressed enough that Ike began taking him on his regular playing route, locations where people had money to spend: lumber camps with sawmills (probably the Piney Woods section of Copiah County), fish frys(sic), and jukes." (My review pdf may not have all final edits, so I have indicated that by the sic).
Other dalliances with women are noted as was his increased notoriety as a musician. They recount that when Johnson came upon Son House and Willie Brown playing at a juke, he started playing. House was there with his mouth wide open seeing how good Robert was. House's comments have led some blues writers to attribute Robert's musical skills as due to supernatural forces, but the authors note House never made such an assertion. The authors provide an overview of the folkloric origins of the selling of one's soul at the crossroads myth and dealing with statements made decades after Robert's death about this myth.
They trace Robert's subsequent career as he worked around the Delta busking at stores and playing jukes and house parties. They detail the dalliance with Robert Lockwood, Jr.'s mother, and Johnson taking Robert Jr. under his wing and mentoring the young man. Johnson's fame would grow including his two recording sessions which include details including auditioning for H.C. Spier. In this time frame, the first of the two known photos of Robert was memorialized at the Hooks studio in Memphis. San Antonio was particularly active the week of his first session celebrating the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and the end of the Texas Centennial Year celebration. While playing in the streets, he was arrested and his guitar broken beyond repair. He called Don Law (who was supervising the recordings) from jail, who got him out of jail and obtained a borrowed guitar for recording. The authors, citing Law, refute the notion that Johnson recorded facing the wall. Law stated that Johnson only turned his back several days later when asked to play for some Mexican musicians.
In addition to detailing the recording sessions, there is considerable discussion of the music of actual recordings Johnson produced in San Antonio, and then a year later in Dallas, and his musical innovations as a delta blues artist. In contrast to most country blues artists whose performances of a song could vary greatly, and whose recorded takes varied similarly, Johnson's second or alternate takes are almost identical to the first one. They quote Henry Townsend, "They (older musicians) would play it this way this time, and the next time it was altogether different—the same tune but it was altogether different. But Robert, he was not like that. Each time, whatever he played, was uniform, and this could make you notice." The authors observe that Robert would adapt parts of older songs, "But Robert’s genius was beyond just knowing good songs to copy: he rewrote them, changed the tempo, synced his guitar more closely with his vocal than those who preceeded (sic) him, added a guitar riff, and literally remade the piece. … The song’s lyrics are thematically cohesive and the overall effect is of a musical whole, and not the type of whole that one would normally hear in a juke joint."
Johnson's recordings made him a prominent juke artist in the Delta area.Through the accounts of Honeyboy Edwards and Johnny Shines (as well as Townsend and Lockwood), we get a sense of his amazing abilities, including the extent of his repertoire. Another aspect was his ability to hear a song on the radio or a record once and be able to play it. Johnny Shines recalled, “Robert was a man who could sit and talk to you like I’m talking to you now, and be listening to the radio at the same time, and whenever he got ready he’d play whatever he heard on that radio. Note for note, chord for chord, … ."
We are taken along not only on his travels in the Delta, but also to St. Louis where Townsend met him, and later the circumstances that Johnson, Shines and Shines' cousin Calvin Frazier traveled North after Frazier had killed a man. They eventually made it to Chicago, then to Detroit, where the trio would go to Windsor, across the river from Detroit and perform gospel songs for a gospel radio show. Frazier would remain in Detroit (where he recorded for the Library of Congress and later was part of the Detroit post-war blues scene). Johnson and Shines made their way to Buffalo and then New Jersey and New York City and even played an Italian wedding in Newark.
Eventually Johnson returns to the Delta for his final juke joint performances and the circumstances that led to his death by poisoning, including naming the person who gave him the corn liquor laced with mothballs that ordinarily would have simply made Johnson sick, but underlying health issues (including an ulcer) exacerbated the liquor's effects.
Detailing his burial and other post-death events, the authors state, "Robert Leroy Johnson, the man, was gone. His legend was just about to begin." It is a legend where myth would obscure reality, but thanks to Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow, we have his real story, which I find more fascinating than the tales spun about him. This will be a must for those interested in vernacular music history and one of the blues greatest artists.
This will be available on June 4 as a hardcover and ebook. I received a pdf to review from a publicist.
Ron Weinstock
